Beta 1 of System Center Virtual Machine Manager is up on the connect.microsoft.com site. More information and details can be found here and here . I'll be installing it today and will post some details once I've run it through a bunch of scenarios.

Redmond Magazine did a good interview with Stephen Toulouse, the guy who runs the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). As most of you know the MSRC is the central point of control and coordination that Microsoft uses for identifying, managing, and...

Over on the Routing and Remote Access Blog , they list some of the RRAS features coming in Vista and Longhorn including routing compartments, NAP enforcement for VPN clients, IPv6, AES encryption algorithm, and some improved usability features.

One of my current projects is an architecture for an advanced technology demonstration lab. Basically a sandbox environment where the customer is going to test upcoming Microsoft and other vendor's products. The goal is to provide remote access to the...

I was reading a post on Steve Riley's blog that linked to a couple of very interesting posts by Jeff Jones on his Think Security blog. He goes into quite a bit of detail on Patchguard and also interviews Forrest Foltz who is a Patchguard Architect at...

Don Dodge, Microsoft's Director of Business Development for emerging businesses, has an interesting post on his blog about how Microsoft approaches acquisitions, the sweet spot of $50-200 million where we've had the most success, etc. He also has a list...

Microsoft and a bunch of other major tech vendors announced publication of a draft specification for an XML language for system management. The spec is called the Service Modeling Language (SML) which is derived from a lot of the work Microsoft has been...

I picked up two books this weekend on storage area networks (SAN) and SAN virtualization. The first is Resilient Storage Networks by Greg Schulz and the second is Storage Virtualization by Tom Clark . Since there are relatively few books out there on...

InfoWorld has a very positive review of Exchange 2007 on their website.
http://www.infoworld.com/reports/32SRexchange.html
InfoWorld: "Multiple precooked configs, a vastly improved Web client, a power command line, and bundled anti-malware add up...